Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Here is poet George Spencer's "Swinging with Fragonard or Les Hasards Heureux de l'Escarpolette" from his collection An Unpious Pilgrim:Dragonflies skim glowing ponds slowly greening.All's a-simmer in the sod,seeds soaked beyond the succulence of loveand then the thawing of motionall leading to Fragonard's fragrant world.What knickers what knockers,a maiden with a tiara of tulips on a swingand peeping putti in the weedswhile the wind abounds with love songs,singing of drum majorettes,of lust's bejeweled slippers.O bring on green swag to frame the moon,luxurious bling to light this electric circuson a night with a sweet tooth for May's candyas the earth yields little green mouths,toothless, longing for love and shouting: Hosannna Hello to spring

Thursday, January 24, 2013

I'm still enjoying this remarkably versatile poet (see previous post), author of The
Mystery of Max Schmitt: Poems on the Life and Work of Thomas Eakins (Turning Point Books, 2004). His
homepage is http://philipdacey.com.

Saturday, January 19, 2013

I have always had a strong love for looking at paintings – a love for color, for the thickness or thinness of paint, and for the miraculous coexistence of sensuous surface reality – brush marks and the grain of canvas showing through – with illusion, the depicted world to be entered. And in thinking about the process of writing poetry, I have often drawn analogies with the painting process, feeling a correspondence, for instance, between the intuited need in one poem for a limpid fluidity of diction and rhythm and the intuited need for transparent color and flowing line in a certain painting; or again, between the compositional need for strong and harsh outlines or heavy thick paint in one painting and for halting rhythms and thick heavy words in a certain poem. The standing back to regard the whole canvas from time to time, then returning to the close embrace of details, also has its parallel in the experience of writing a poem. Yet I have come to see that the art of photography shares with poetry a factor more fundamental: it makes its images by means anybody and everybody uses for the most banal purposes, just as poetry makes it structures, its indivisibilities of music and meaning, out of the same language used for utilitarian purposes, for idle chatter, or for uninspired lying.

Because of this resemblance in the conditions of the two arts – because the camera, like language, is put to constant nonartistic use, quotidian use by nonspecialists, as the painter’s materials (though often misused) are not – a poet finds, I think, a kind of stimulation and confirmation in experiencing the work of photographic artists that is more specific, closer to his poetic activity, than the pleasure and love he feels in looking at paintings. I can often turn to fine photographs to help myself discover next steps in a poem I am writing: almost it’s as if I can respond to such photographs because I’m a working poet, while my response to painting, intense though it is, is in some degree detached from my life as as active artist, is a more passive receptivity.

Even though one may never write a poem directly inspired by a photograph, these images drawn from the same sources the poet’s own eye can see (photography having even at its most individual, subjective, or transformational, a relationship to the optical far more basic than that of painting) and which are transformed into high art through a medium of unexotic availability, connect at a deep level with the poetic activity; and are, in fact, possible sources – as nature is source – for the poet, to the degree that paintings are not, even to someone who loves them as much as I do. Perhaps another way of saying it would be that photographs – and I don’t mean only documentary photographs – teach the poet to see better, or renew his seeing in ways closer to the kind of seeing he needs to do for his own work, than paintings do; while the stimulus of paintings for the poet as poet. i.e., their specific value for him aside from his general human enjoyment of them, may have more to do with his compositional gesture-sense (as music may) than with the visual.

Sunday, January 13, 2013

I've been reading Maxine Kumin's wonderful tribute to her friend and colleague the poet Anne Sexton "A Friendship Remembered" in To Make a Prairie. Here is Sexton's"The Starry Night":That does not keep me from having a terrible need of—shall

I say the word—religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars.

- Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother

The town does not existexcept where one black-haired tree slipsup like a drowned woman into the hot sky.The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars. Oh starry starry night! This is howI want to die.

It moves. They are all alive.Even the moon bulges in its orange irons to push children, like a god, from its eye.The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars. Oh starry starry night! This is how I want to die:

into that rushing beast of the night, sucked up by that great dragon, to split from my life with no flag,no belly,no cry.

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